🚀 go-pugleaf

daveh@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Haynie) writes:
>If you're interested in modern architectures, look into the INMOS Transputer
>series.  These are 16 and 32 bit processors that employ an number of
>RISC architectural ideas.
...
>I've got no connections to INMOS, other than an appreciation of the 
>Transputer.

Its a simply elegant processor at the instruction set level.

Don't look to a Transputer for gobs of registers, though.  It's only got
an instruction pointer, a workspace pointer (essentially a stack pointer --
local variables are offsets from the workspace pointer), and a stack of
registers that are 3 deep known oddly enough as aReg, bReg, and cReg.

Because they are maintained as a stack, you can't randomly address them.
eg, addition:

	ldc 1
	ldc 2
	add

leaves 3 in the A register.

It wins hands down (so far :^) as a hardware multi-tasker.  It could use
a smaller time-slice, though.

	Andy


ps: It does stash a number of other "processor temporaries" and processor
    registers in on-chip RAM....
-- 
Andy Pfiffer					andy@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu
Cornell Theory Center / Cornell U.		cornell!batcomputer!andy
Home of the first usable T-Series		(607) 255-8686
"...that's the way a Transputer works, right?"  Systems Group